In recent years, as social media has evolved, organizations have developed identities through social media channels. The participation of organizations, such as large corporations, in social media interaction has resulted in an increased flow of social media communications from customers or individuals sharing information about the organizations. Thus, social media has evolved as a channel for assessing public perception of large organizations. The public perception is important to the organizations as it impacts business success. Furthermore, organizations can improve and evolve based on an evaluation of the social media content. For example, organizations can develop and enhance features and services that are viewed positively through social media content and can develop expertise to address those services and features that are viewed negatively. Social media content may be posted in an online forum, including social networks such as Facebook™, MySpace™, and Twitter™. It should be understood that as used herein, the phrases “social network” and “social media” should be construed to encompass online interactive networks generally, including professional networks such as Linked In™ and photo sharing applications such as Instagram™.
Social media posts are often brief and frequently include unconventional abbreviations as well as slang terms. Furthermore, as with brief written messages in general, these messages are devoid of tone or inflection. Thus, the content of social media posts can be difficult to interpret. Furthermore, due to different customs and conventions across various demographic groups, social media posts may seem to be more or less hostile than they are intended to be. Thus, judging the factual value or customer engagement value of the posts can be extremely challenging.
To address difficulties with interpreting content, known filtering systems may evaluate content based simply on a list of positive or negative words. For example, the system may determine that any post using swear words reflects a negative view of the organization. In contrast, posts using words of praise or words viewed positively, such as “excellent” or “pleased” or “satisfied”, may be deemed to reflect positively on the organization. Of course, this technique is inaccurate and prone to error, as positive words can be used sarcastically and negative words can be used for emphasis and vice versa. Thus, the fact that a message contains positive or negative words is not necessarily indicative of the tone of the entire message.
The evaluation of the positive or negative impact of social media content cannot be reliably accomplished without consideration of context. In fact, even with consideration of context, other factors, such as the identity of the author and demographic characteristics of the author may further alter the perceived meaning of the social media content. Known filtering systems fail to address the manner in which different people, from different cultural contexts, different localities, and different demographics, might have a differing method of communicating a similar message. Currently existing system may filter out negative words, thus often removing actual meaning.
Accordingly, a system is needed that moves beyond evaluation of the positivity or negativity of single words. Instead, a system is needed that considers context and demographic characteristics of the poster of the social media content. Additionally, it may be appropriate to consider the intended audience and the characteristics of the intended audience. For example, the size of the audience, the location of the audience, and the demographic characteristics of the intended audience are factors that may assist with interpretation of social media content.
Furthermore, output from an evaluation system should preferably assess a degree of positivity of negativity of social media content, so that concerns can be appropriately addressed within the evaluating organization.